


Loss Ficlet: Cats

by missclairebelle



Series: Loss (In Chronological Order) [7]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, cat people confuse me too Jamie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-05
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-10-22 19:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17668529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Summer lunch on the warmest day of the year.  No time for twenty questions, so they'll settle for five.





	Loss Ficlet: Cats

**Author's Note:**

> This ficlet is smack dab between Boyfriend and Girlfriend. I’m pulling myself out of a “I hate everything I write abyss.” @sassenachwaffles and @kkruml fixed this for me. Along with @balfeheughlywed and @notevenjokingfic, they’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting to fix me, to keep me going in this community, and to remedy my weirdness about writing lately. All of them deserve a lot of my love. 💜

##  **Loss Ficlet  
** **Cats  
** **June 2016**

 

On what was to date the warmest day of our first summer together ( _a day when sweat wicked across my hairline from the slight exertion of the uphill walk from my flat to work early in the morning_ ), Jamie called me in the early afternoon.  

At that point, we had not really taken up hushed conversations in elevators and hallways in the middle part of the day.  Not knowing what to expect, I answered with over-eager, unsure fingers, and half-expected some emergency.

But he instead went headlong into hard selling me on abandoning my lunch of cafeteria tuna salad and soda water.  

_A walk in the park. Some sunshine. A lunch from the line of food trucks that lined up in the park adjacent to the hospital, paid for by him._

Contrasted with the stack of paperwork on my desk and the two outpatient procedures on my afternoon calendar, I was an easy target for such a proposition.  

Tracing the beveled edge of my phone, I played coy, asking, “You’ll let me order whatever I want?”

His response had been  _cheerful_ , his breath loose between words. “Aye, whatever ye fancy.”

I bit down on my lip, and asked if was already walking over.

“Of course I am, Sassenach,” he said as though it were the most normal of occurrences for a Tuesday afternoon.

“Little bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Starting a walk over here before I’ve even said ‘yes’?”

He tutted a response to the accusation, turning the questions on me.  “The  _better_ question would be whether my favorite Sassenach doctor would ever say ‘ _no_ ’ to a free lunch.”  

Pausing for a moment, I let the realization linger in my mind that the answer was likely ‘ _no_ ’ absent some articulable work or life conflict, but Jamie had moved off of the subject and was cursing an anonymous crosswalk patron for knocking into him on what he characterized as a “ _ridiculous wee hoverboard thing_.”  

The moment was lost, and he promised to meet me in ten minutes.

Twelve minutes later, I popped out of the stairwell to the sight of my tall, broad Scot leaning against the wall outside the bank of elevators. He was on his mobile, too casual and too handsome in a pair of loose-fitting jeans and a Rolling Stones t-shirt.  

The first thing I blurted out was, “You look really good.”

Quirking an eyebrow, he looked up, and scattered a glance around the reception area like a fistful of marbles before giving me an unabashed once over.

His effort to ensure no one was near enough to notice him checking me out made feel like Alice in Wonderland.  But a version of Alice given a cocktail of contradictory potions to drink at once.  To shrink to the size of a thimble and swell up and out into an engorged version of herself.  From any man other than this one in particular, his lingering once over would have lacquered my insides an incandescent red.  But  _Jamie_  piqued only soaring affection and a base instinct to chart a lunch break escape route for a furious, panting quickie.

I looked down at myself, suddenly acutely aware of my wardrobe.  My dress clothes had been stuffed into a plastic bag early in the day, covered in the chunks of a ten-year-old patient’s spectacularly well-projected vomit.  My backup set of dress clothes had met a similar fate when I rounded a corner into a patient exiting a washroom with an uncovered urine sample. After a spectacularly hot shower, I had given up on the idea of actual clothing, and was wearing a set of scrubs with the hospital logo over the breast.  It wasn’t my sexiest look.  I had a  _handful of pens in a fucking pocket protector_ of all things.

“Sorry, should have changed.”

“Nah, I like it.  Ye look like ye’re on Grey’s Anatomy.”  He rolled his shoulders, slipping his mobile into his front pocket and reaching for my hand, finding it easily without looking.

“I put lipstick on for you,” I commented, my tranquil tone that did not match the screaming in my head ( _am I an extra or a leading lady?_ ) as I tucked my hair behind my ear. could flirt with him in the light of my workday without blushing.  

Jamie stepped forward, roving fingers miming my own to tuck away another stray curl.  With his touch lingering, he locked sights at my lips in a very purposeful way.  “What a waste.”

“Huh?”

“The lipstick.”

I inhaled, fixated on watching him inspect my lips.  “You don’t like it?”

“I like it fine.”  He kissed my cheek. “But if I’m to walk into to my next meeting wi’out lookin’ like I’ve got a communicable disease spread about my lips, I canna kiss ye senseless like I’ve been wanting since I left ye Sunday.”

“Oh,” I breathed, realizing that this was our first real foray into the workweek together.

With a slight tug, he guided me into the sunshine, across the street, beyond the park gate.  We followed our noses to lunch ( _a sausage and apple pie to split_ ), and while waiting, he commented rather blandly that he wanted to learn five new things about me.

“Like  _what_?” I inquired, taking a long sip of lemonade.  “And why only  _five_  things?”

“Weel, yer lunch break’s forty-five minutes, aye?”  

I nodded, wondering if he had some sort of bionic memory that stored the more asinine details that I shared with him.

“I dinna think there’s time for us to play  _twenty_  questions  _and_  to eat.”  He took the pie from the truck proprietor with a nod of thanks, pulled a few spare napkins from the dispenser, and slipped  an arm around my waist. “And I’ll listen to as much as ye have to tell me, but I figured we could  _start_  with five.”

A savory steam billowed from the pie as Jamie took a comically-large bite and proceeded to chew with his mouth open, slurring some version of “ _ifrinn… that’s hot_.”

Snorting derisively with a sudden, aching hunger roaring my belly, I took the pie from him and blew on it gently.  “Is it at least fair for me to assume that you’ll scatter some little tidbits in kind?”

“I’m nothin’ but an open book to ye, Sassenach.” He hooked a single finger into the paperbag waist of my scrub pants, urging me forward. “What’s next for lunch?  Pie’s too hot and no’ that tasty.”

Shrugging ( _he was right, the pie wasn’t the best, but it had been his choice and free to me_ ), I lifted my chin towards a neon pink truck parked just halfway down the park square.  

_Our next food victim: a pulled chicken sandwich loaded with pickled radishes and onions_.

“First tidbit, as ye call it. Tell me something good.”

“Well, first thing about me… I want to split a sandwich.”

“Ye canna count  _that_  as one of the things about ye.”  I did not need to look at him to know he was exasperated and rolling his eyes.

“To be fair, you didn’t specify the nature of what you want to know.”

We approached the façade of the truck and I stared up at the menu, realizing I never wanted him to remove the levee of his hand from the valley at the small of my back. “Do you think the pickled onions will infect the rest of the sandwich with pickled onion flavor?  Trying to decide if I’ll like them…”

“And what do you  _mean_  ‘ _infect the sandwich_ ’?”

“For example,” I began a little haughtily, attempting to adjust my purse without shrugging off his hand or spilling my lemonade, “olives ruin  _everything_. Simply by existing in the vicinity of an otherwise perfectly tasty food… like pizza.”

The line of his brow crumpled in a transparent show of disbelief. “But ye can pick toppings off of a pizza.”

I shook my head at his protest.  “No, no, no. Olives can’t be  _picked off_.” He was looking at me with a stark incredulity, as though I had just divulged a secret sixth toe on each foot and hadn’t learned how to read until I turned twenty-seven.  “There’s  _logic_  behind it.”

“By all means, share this  _logic_.”  

“Want this?” I held up the mostly-finished pie.  He shook his head, and I arced a perfect shot into a rubbish bin.  “Olives leave little rings of quite frankly  _revolting_  flavor on anything they touch. Like an environmental superfund site beneath a decommissioned factory.  What’s bad is in the  _soil_.  Or, in the case of pizza, the  _cheese_.”

For a moment he stood flat footed and a little dumbstruck, bending to take a long sip from my lemonade.

“You seem confused.  It isn’t difficult.”  

“No’ confused.  I dinna ken what I can possibly say in response,” he said with a mildly exasperated sigh.  

“I mean, there’s nothing really  _to_ say, Jamie.”  

I took a sip of my lemonade.  

I loved him a little off balance.  

He was, almost as a rule, steady and sexy.  A bit ruffled by the stranger bits of me, he was unbalanced and somehow even sexier.

“Tell ye what… I’ll go buy the sandwich with the onions. If they offend ye gravely, and ye simply canna go on wi’ them havin’ existed on the chicken and bun, I’ll buy ye another.”

It was instinct. To rise onto my tiptoes, to kiss his cheek. For a few beats, my lips lingered, although my calves burned in protest of meeting his height. His hand somehow molded closer to my back. And when his nose nudged into the slightly sweat-damp curls at my temple, I could have sworn that I heard him inhale.

“I dinna ken how ye manage it, Claire, but ye’re just ridiculous enough to be endearing, yet no’ enough to be high maintenance.”  

_I cursed my stupid, last minute decision to apply the bloody lipstick._

He pinched my side before retrieving the wallet from his back pocket and headed towards the sandwich truck.  

_Swagger.  I was seeing someone with swagger.  Someone who called me in the middle of the workday.  Someone who I thought would scratch an itch, but had come to mean something more._

Shielding my eyes, I watched him laughing with the truck’s proprietor.  As he carefully rearranged the meat on the sandwich, I racked my brain for whatever I could admit for my second fact. My mind fell off the saddle seat of its task when Jamie deposited a perfectly round globule of sauce on the tip of one of this fingers, sucked it clean, and proceeded to squirt some on the bread.

_Jesus Christ, that lipstick was a horrible decision._

Before I could launch myself back into sharing mode with a perfectly-formed comment about how much I had enjoyed a summer living abroad in a Peruvian hostel, Jamie was holding the sandwich just inches from my mouth.  

Instead of taking a bite, I stood there stricken, immobile and dumb for no good reason at all other than that  _he_  was standing close enough that I caught a whiff of his shampoo.  I suddenly realized that he smelled  _really_  good.  Each of my bodily systems anticipated an imminent melting of my organs into goo and acted in concert to shut down.

_‘Are you trying to kill me?’ my mind demanded, though my lips failed to open._

“It’s good. Try.”  

His sunglasses were precariously perched on the end of his nose and a dot of sauce clung to his lower lip. His unmannered tongue darted out quickly to sweep away the sauce, and for a moment my breath caught in anticipation of him kissing me.  ( _He didn’t._ )

I reached for the crusty roll, starting, “Well, hand it over––”

“No.” His interrupting head shook, I mounted my most serious death glare.  The one I used on patients who plainly had not followed doctor’s orders for post-surgical rehabilitation. It did not work. “Just  _bite_ , Claire.”

I huffed.  “I don’t need to be  _fed_  by you.”

“Ye’ve got yer drink.  Ye’ll make a mess of yerself if ye do it one-handed.”

I finished my lemonade, wondering if it would be too forward to steal his sunglasses for my own purposes ( _to see his eyes so I could have some hope of reading him, to protect my own from pernicious UVA and UVB rays_ ).

“Just like yer perfectly round arse, this sandwich requires two hands to be handled properly.”

“You are  _horrible_.”

“Aye, that I am. Now… ”  We each took half steps forward, the warm atmospheres of our bellies melting into one another on collision.  “Try it.”

I bit into the sandwich, managing only a sliver of bread. Jamie clicked his tongue, a sound that made me smile around my dainty bite.

“Try harder for the perfect bite, get a little of everything.  I’ll no’ be wi’ a lass who canna make a sandwich a near sexual experience.”

“ _Mansplainer_ ,” I accused him levelly.  Behind his sunglasses, his eyes went round.

“Och, no,” he grumbled, mouth opening and then closing in a firm line.  When I laughed, he shook his head a bit, and continued.  “I dinna ken how ye’ve managed to feed yerself for all yer years, Sassenach, if ye think that was a bite of a sandwich. Now, get the dastardly onion, radish, some of the chicken.”

“ _Foodie_.”

At this, he did his best impression of someone thoroughly exasperated. “Will ye shut up and  _eat_ the sandwich that I spent my hard-earned money on, for Christ’s sake?”

Offering what I hoped was a seductive look ( _but just made him smirk_ ), I took another bite.  This time, there was nothing dainty about it. The perfect layering of flavors made me salivate –– crusty bread and savory roasted meat, vinegary vegetables, crunchy cucumber, and a bright, herbaceous sauce that broke free from the soft cushion of the bread and dribbled over my lips.  And though I was not one to vocalize a fit of ecstasy over food, I let slip a little moan at the sandwich’s flavor profile.

He wiped at my mouth with a napkin, giving me a short, proud nod, whispering, “Better.”

We started to wander.

“So… you’re a  _foodie_ …”  Crumbs fell from my lips like boulders down the face of a cliff. I felt utterly unladylike.  

“A bit,” he admitted.  “Though ye wouldna ken from the fact that we’ve hardly eaten together. I mean, outside of the slop that’ll deliver to my place.”

I could not have given a toss less, still chewing and saying, “Perhaps if I had a better  _boyfriend_ ,” I said with an unabashed emphasis, “I’d go on more  _dates_.”  I wiped the crumbs away from the front of my scrub topping, adding, “One who’d assist me, a mere mortal, learn Edinburgh’s finest spots.”

“Ye’re quite taken by that word, aren’t ye?”  

“What word?’” I quizzed, knowing damn well what he was poking at. “Mortal?”

_He snorted a laugh.  The bloody tease_.

Even shielded by sunglasses, I could tell that his eyes were alight.  Jars of fireflies with a running child’s hand clapped enthusiastically over the top, attempting to contain something meant to move beyond margins and without borders.  

“No.  The word ‘ _boyfriend_.’”

I had said  _that word_  three days earlier.  A slip of the tongue when we were locked at the ankles, flirting over the spelling of a nine-letter word that meant “ _carved stone box for funeral_ ” ( _sarcophagus_ ). My mind was a thousand miles from work when a colleague’s approach had me blurting it out as I introduced Jamie.  

_Boyfriend_.  

Though Jamie had repeatedly made crystal clear to me that he actively wanted  _more_  with me ( _from me_ ), he had yet to echo a label ( _any label_ )back.  

(“ _Girlfriend.”  Not yet a word on his lips, at least with reference to me.  Something about the idea of him saying it from that well-made, pink, talented mouth made my cheeks go pink, partially from embarrassment and maybe a little from annoyance that I had not yet had the opportunity to hear him say it_.)

A flash of white teeth, a thumb brushing crumbs off of my lips as I took another enthusiastic bite pulled me out of the mood.  

_God this man and his endless well of sexy, quiet incidental caresses, glances, and syllables_.

He was gentle, as though he saw my hesitancy mounting at the mention of my unintended use of the word. He was trying to bring me back to center.  Softly, he asked, “The onions to yer liking?”

“Yes. They’re quite unlike olives.”

Again, he shook his head and took his own hearty bite as we resumed our procession through the park.

“So, ye’ve branded me a foodie and a mansplainer, it’s time for you to tell something to  _me_.”

Somehow, the hostel in Peru slipped from my mind ( _the things that would dovetail with this conversation –– what I ate, the people I met, the nights of dancing pressing up to other people that made me sound infinitely more interesting than I actually was_ ), and instead, I blurted out,“I’m a cat person.”

His response was immediate.  “What?  _Why_?”

From his tone and the way he turned to look at me, he had apparently never heard something quite so offensive.  

The  _Star Wars_  prequels ( _deemed by him to be so unwatchable that they did not exist_ ).  

Bin liners that did not match his garbage can ( _a cursing declaration one morning as he opened a box and realized it would not fit in his bin, a statement that Parliament should enact reforms to standardize such things_ ).  

My aversion to folding laundry that resulted in a bedroom chair mounded with semi-wrinkled blouses and twisted wads of my lacy underthings ( _a Saturday afternoon where he attempted to get me to rethink the way I folded clothes with a lukewarm effort to convince me that it would somehow “spark joy” or some nonsense_ ).

The facial recognition feature on his cell phone ( _something about Big Brother and not trusting corporations with his biometric data_ ).  

_Cats_.

I shrugged,polishing off my drink. “They’re independent.  They’re smart.  They don’t need tending to.”

“Imma dog person.”  ( _A challenge, to see where I’d land with respect to canine companion animals.  I wouldn’t._ )

“I gathered as much from your almost-visceral response to hearing that I am a  _cat_  person.”

“But… dogs are lovable and a little dependent, Sassenach. How could ye no’ love those big dumb brown puppy eyes?”  He offered a valiant approximation of said dumb expression, eyes  endlessly blue and dopey, but I was not a woman easily deterred.

“ _De-pen-dent._ ” I popped my lips after each syllable.  “You’re right about that much, and I like to leave town for a weekend break now and then.  I can’t just  _leave_  a dog the way I can  _leave_  a cat.”

“Ye dinna even  _have_  a cat!” The pitch of his voice climbed like a rising sun, slowly at first and then exploding across the silent horizon of our conversation.

Putting on my thickest, most obnoxious Scottish affectation, I opined, “You’re having a  _verra_ strong reaction to this, my lad.”

His face crumpled a bit and he took off his sunglasses, tucked them into the neck of his t-shirt.  “I’m having a verra strong reaction because I thought I kent the essence of who ye  _are_ , Claire. At yer core.”

With a renewed gusto, he shoveled the rest of the sandwich into his mouth. My voice was almost a grumble when I said, “I wanted another bite.”

Raising a single eyebrow, it was clear that the realization about the size of his bite was slowly dawning. I reached up and pinched his cheek and smiled. He would be chewing for quite awhile, so I took the moment as the opportunity to hard sell cats.

“They’re compact.  They cost less.  They do not need to be taken up and down the stairs to toilet.  They clean themselves.”  I took the sauce-smeared wrapper from his hands, balled it up, and binned it along with my cup.  

He swallowed hard, mumbling under what I assume he thought was under his breath, “ _I’m dating a crazy cat lady._ ”

“You are! That’s me!”  Laughing, I tugged his hand towards a third food truck ( _frozen yogurt, a simply sweet end to our shared meal_ ).“Only, I don’t have a cat at the moment.”

“ _Next_  ye’ll be tellin’ me that ye dinna like chocolate.”  

Turning to the man at the truck window, I ordered a single strawberry frozen yogurt in a sugar cone.  The sound that came out of Jamie then, a cross between frustration and indignation, made me laugh.  He busied himself with pouring two cups of ice water from the pitcher on the counter.  I slipped another five pound note through the window, whispering to the attendant. “Add a chocolate cone, please.”

We carried our dessert to a corner of the park shaded by a towering oak tree and found a relatively secluded bench.  “So, we’ve established my deepest flaw as a human is apparently my affection for felines,” I started, as I sat, holding the chocolate cone out to him.

“Aye.” Though I thought he was primed to take the cone, he caught my wrist.  Our hands hovered between us weightlessly ( _for seconds, four hours_ ) before he drew the joined mass to his mouth and licked clean a smear of strawberry.  “It’s no’ so bad, yer  _non-chocolate_.”

“Chocolate ice cream tastes like…  _nothing_.”  He snorted, and I smiled. “Should we just call this whole thing off? Have I ruined it? Cats.  Yogurt.  Olives.”

“Nah. I’ll let ye make it up to me later… ye have a multitude of  _other_  talents.”  The promise dwelled in his eyes, etched in stone.  It made something knot in the pit of my stomach, just below the slight dip of my lower stomach.

I then learned that Jamie Fraser was  _about_  as good at waggling his eyebrows as he was at winking. ( _Abysmal._ )

“Tell me something else,” he said, dropping my hand and taking his cone.  His gaze crawled over me in a slower, sexier way than it had at the elevator bank back at the hospital.  This time he did not bother to look around, did not hide the way his eyes lingered.

I couldn’t help but wonder what he saw.  

_A woman who was mildly interesting in her ridiculousness and a scrub top, dusted with the grit of crumbs from her lunch?  A woman who was pressing down the instinct to swoon (an instinct that she had never previously harbored for another human)?_

I leaned forward.  “Between the lipstick and the onions, can I convince you to give me a little kiss?”

“What of the cats?” he slurred, though he leaned towards me just a touch.  

I nearly closed the distance. He wiped at my lips with a white napkin, looked down at the imprinted smear of my rosy lipstick, and shrugged.

Confirming, I nodded. “And the cats…. I’m a package deal.”

As though he were giving up a birthright, he sighed heavily and leaned into my mouth.  The kiss was unfussy, strawberry chilled. It was chaste, not urgent. He hovered when our lips parted, eyes tethered to my mouth, as though he could see the stilted pattern of my breath.

“Your turn, Jamie.”   _Silence_.  “Secret time.”

“Yer tea.”  My head surely must have been spinning.  He was too close, too far.  “Ye make it too weak.  There’s no point to it.”

I almost barked out a laugh, dropping a single peck on the corner of his lips before pulling back.  “ _Fine_.  That secret vinaigrette you make?”

“Mmmm?”

“ _I know what is in it, Fraser._ ”

“Ye  _don’t_ ,” he said, eyes darkening and brows drawing together.  “Ye filthy wee liar.”

I listed the ingredients, watching his upper lip tick with equal measures of surprise and amusement.

“Weel, I stole it from my mam, who stole it from my Aunt Letitia.  Started a family war, and now they’ll probably kill me in the night for letting it leak to an outsider.”  

_An outsider_.

I kissed him again, let my eyes flutter closed.  

Our tongues were innocent, slow, perfect.  I wondered how I’d ever make it through another lunch without  _this_  to fortify me.  The taste of matching lips, the sound at the back of his throat as he leaned closer and curled his fingers around the back of my neck.

When we broke apart, he said, “That’s my story. That my mam stole the recipe, that I’ll die for letting ye ken it. Which means that it’s yer turn, Sassenach.  That one about the vinaigrette was a vicious blow.  Tell me the meanest thing someone has ever done to ye.”

I could tell he was searching for something  _light_ ( _something adjacent to the theft of a recipe that within a family was tantamount to high treason_ ), but my brain veered to  _true_ ( _the meanest thing that had ever happened to me_ ).

“I was a  _huge_  nerd in school.”

“Yeah?” He leaned forward and took a thoughtful taste of my frozen yogurt with his eyebrows raised and headed somewhere near the vicinity of his hairline. “Big glasses? Braces?”

Rolling my eyes, I pulled back my cone and held it opposite him at arm’s length. “I bought you your own cone, Fraser.  _Leave mine alone_.  And this is a  _serious_  one––”

“A verra serious strawberry cone––”

“I mean the  _story_.  The yogurt isn’t serious. The  _secret_  is serious.”

His face morphed. The slight wrinkles at the corners of his eyes faded as he quit laughing, eyebrows returned to half-mast, the corners of his mouth went straight.

“I  _mean_  that when I went back to school after wandering the planet with Lamb, I was  _weird_.” I paused, looking at him with furrowed brows. His lips parted, like he was about to say something, but he closed his mouth.  _An invitation to proceed_.  “I guess I hadn’t had much in the way of social interaction with kids my own age.”

“Aye?” he said, tone lifting at the end quizzically. I passed Jamie my cone, suddenly sick to my stomach.  He took it, but made no move to bring it any closer to himself.

“Yeah –– I thought science was just the best thing ever –– which  _it is_ , but that’s beside the point.” I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.  Some kids were kicking a ball just across the sidewalk, little voices shrieking and laughing in high tones. “Good God, I haven’t talked about this in  _ages_.”

He readjusted, two cones in one hand.  A thick expanse of thigh met mine as he slid closer –– blue jeans and blue scrubs meeting with no daylight in between.  I looked down at the crease of our joined limbs and felt his hand skate down the middle of my back.   _Broad.  Warm._   Bent forward just a little to match my posture, he angled his face towards me.

“This  _boy_  messaged me on MySpace.”  _Pause. A heartbeat._  “ _MySpace_  was a thing. We talked and talked and talked. He was handsome and funny, had a decent grasp of grammar. He told me I was pretty.  He told me his  _secrets_.  I told him mine.”

“Claire…” Jamie’s voice was soft, as though he knew that he was interrupting a story never told, but that he had to show me that he was  _there_.

It was a story that lived in truth in my head for years, but had never  _truly_ made its way out.  To anyone.  It was a story that would now live its second truth out loud, in the mind of another.  

_The mind of this man_.

“We said ‘I love you,’ and we were going to meet up. I had never said it to a boy before. Well, I mean… I had to Uncle Lamb.  To my fa––”

My breath hitched a little in an unexpected swell of emotion. I swallowed hard, attempting to push down the feeling before speaking again.

“–– _father_.But never a male who I wasn’t blood.”

I picked at the stray thread dangling from the bottom of the tie on my scrub pants.  Suddenly, nothing seemed more important than breaking that orphan thread free and watching its meandering descent to the sidewalk. For it to be found, to be woven into some bird’s treetop nest, to form a resting place for eggs protected by the industrious bird’s beating wings, its sharp beak. I pressed the toe of my shoes into a small crack in the sidewalk. I wanted to crawl inside of it.  To meet the center of the earth, but I had committed to the tale and would see it through.

“It wasn’t real. The messages were from some girls in my class.  Ones who I thought were friends, but… girls are fickle.  They were finished with me, and when I showed up to the party, he was in on it.  I mean, I didn’t  _know_  right away.  He took me to a spare bedroom. Kissed me, put his hands up my shirt, tried to undo my bra.  I  _wanted_  to, Jamie… until the giggling in the closet started.”

I heard, but did not see, him swallow. I studied the crack, tried to figure out how the pieces of sidewalk fit together at one point and whether the fissure could tell me where the whole thing had gone wrong.    
  


“The video was all over the Internet by Sunday morning.  Claire Beauchamp.  The slut of the High Pointe School.”

“ _Jesus_.”  His voice was thick, words burdened by his Scots accent so heavily that the words became difficult to pick apart from one another. “That guy, those girls… they violated you.”

“Hmmm.”  I lifted my eyebrows, having already known that for years.   _Betrayed.  Violated.  Fucked me up._   “They did.  He did.”

I turned, took my cone back, gave it a tentative lick.  I had to be back at work in ten minutes, prepping for another surgery.  

“That’s one of my ugliest secrets. I don’t want to hear yours right now.”  For a moment I wondered if it made me awful, to unburden myself and not give in response.  But something about his posture, the look on his face, the seam between our legs, told me that it was  _just fine_. “Tell me something good instead.  Don’t ask me how I feel about what happened. Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind.”

“We’ll no’ raise our girls to be like that, aye?”

“ _What_?  _That_  is where your mind went?”  The laugh that came from me was barking, foreign, but somehow genuine.  His response was not in the same universe as what I had expected.

“Weel, it’s either that or gettin’ this lad and these girls’ names, and payin’ them each a visit.”

“ _Our girls_.”  I meant to say it as a question mark, but it sounded more like a prediction.  It was not quite a premonition.  And, quite surprisingly, I did not find the idea terrifying.

“Aye, ye ken thatI intend to have bairns wi’ ye.” The lightness in his voice was coy, joking for the sake of flirtation, but the tips of his ears burned a startling pink.

“I’ve told ye as much before… that morning when ye read me the riot act about no’ askin’ ye about birth control until after I’d already lain wi’ ye, and––”

I cut him off.  He was trying to back pedal, to shift the tone away from sounding so serious, but he was failing miserably.  “It’s 2016.  No one says  _lain_  anymore, save old people, and––”

“ _Anyway_ … I’ve got an entire ten-year plan. I’m going raise an entire  _commune_  of children with ye, Claire.”  

The memory of our talk of  _protection_  over breakfast was fresh in my mind, as was the comment he’d made as he tugged me back down the hallway towards his bedroom.  

_He wanted children with me.  Not then, at least._

_This, though, was different. Suddenly it did not feel like a joking throwaway, even though he was fighting like hell to keep the moment light._

My mouth dried and the firm muscle of my heart went wobbly, banging untethered against lungs and sternum and ribs and pitching south into the well of my stomach.  

_It was too much, too soon, but it somehow wasn’t_.  

My sympathetic nervous system sent a screaming signal to each of my limbs.

Between fight or flight, my body was willing me to flee, to recognize that he  _wasn’t joking_.  

But I stayed stock still instead, studying him and willing my feet to remain planted.  

“And who do you suppose will  _gestate_  this commune, Jamie?”

“ _You_. Right here in yer wee belly.” He rubbed his palm over my stomach, smirking.  His touch left a warm path where it had been –– sunlight and affection seeking to penetrate my skin and find the core of me.  “Surely any child we have’ll be full of piss and vinegar. And any lad, weel, he’ll no doubt be braw and take after his da––”

“Who is his da?” It took effort to joke without choking on the knot tying itself quite efficiently in my vocal cords.

“Ye ken good and well who his da will be, Sassenach,” Jamie responded a little darkly, drawing my mouth closer so he was just inches away. “I’ve ruined ye for other men.”

“Is that so?” I asked, feeling the outer swell of my lower lip brush over his just slightly.  _The bloody Scot was right_.   _There was no coming back for me._  “You think that you’re King of Men then?”

“Aye. It’s a scientifically-established fact even.”

I barely felt his mouth when he kissed me.

I was disembodied –– my head was ten thousand leagues above my body, floating overhead.

When he pulled back, we rose wordlessly and made the short walk back to the hospital.

_Babies.  No cats._


End file.
